Brian White

Rock Band has, literally overnight, become the newest glue that ties together even the most videogame-resistant in my group of friends. We played Friday night well into the wee hours and met up on Saturday and everyone couldn’t stop talking about how much fun was had. The last people you’d expect had the strongest grips on the controllers and the drum sticks.

The beauty really is in the mixed difficulty levels. Easy bass mixed with Hard drums, and people crying to start the song over because dammit, they’re going to nail it this time!

Sony has to get on their horse and get orders of magnitude more songs into the system for those who aren’t fans of Rush, the Police, or Black Sabbath (which we happen to be). It also needs a smarter system of payment and download to deal with the 2am song purchases in which, I’m guessing, alcohol consumption will be a factor in a large percentage. It’s pretty cumbersome right now but could be better integrated with the game.

Get to work, Sony! The dollar bills were being thrown around faster than a West Baltimore street craps game! “Here’s two bucks for My Sharona, buy it now!” We need more songs, like yesterday! There’s a lot of people ready to fork over those bills for all manner of shredditude.

I really am mesmerized when companies open up their kimonos and reveal some inside info. Last week, Google shared some information on the prediction markets inside Google.

I have Markus Frind’s blog in my feed reader because he feels very comfortable talking about the raw numbers of his business. I believe that he feels that he’s so different from his competitors, and that newcomers will find it impossible to duplicate his success, that he’s comfortable talking about anything and everything to a refreshing degree of transparency. I started reading his blog when I read that he needed a second web server because he was hitting the 64k concurrent IP address limit (!).

His business, Plenty of Fish, was profiled in the New York Times and I noticed this:

A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive.

How many businesses will put forth that they purge 1/3 of their member profiles each month? That’s refreshing to read. More often, I’ll read published total user numbers and suspect the business is ruffling its chest feathers and presenting numbers that fold in inactive users. This kind of obfuscation may be advantageous to your everyday business, but Plenty of Fish is definitely not your everyday business.

I have a few articles like this bookmarked, including the great SmugMug post about Amazon S3. SmugMug talks about numbers to a surprising degree, and is worth a read (and a re-read).

I ran across this today (emphasis mine):

I don’t know if the author of this sponsored post was in a rush here, but I thought I’d point that out. After all, brianwhite.org is a Website That Cares!

Added: Since it’s been a while since I blogged about Webspam (I work on the Google Webspam team), I’ll add a reference to our quality guidelines on link schemes.